When Unmesh Dinda of PiXimperfect says that this is hands down the best automated skin retouching software ever created, you might want to pay attention.

There is a wealth of information for every step of the photographic process, but one area that drastically improved my work some years ago is also one of the areas discussed the least.

A lot of people associated HDR with over-processed, surreal images. This is not always the case. Shooting HDR can be very useful in different circumstances. It is often seen in real estate and landscape photography and can be very useful to balance a wide range of light levels. There are many programs out there for merging images together to create an HDR photo, but one of the simplest ways to create these dramatic photographs is using Photoshop's built-in HDR Pro.

When going through hundreds of photos, workflow processing can be a real pain. Tools like Lightroom can help speed up the process, but nothing can compare to the Adobe Photoshop. Here are a few tips that can help you speed up your workflow process considerably.

Adobe touted much faster speeds with the release of Lightroom Classic CC (essentially, Lightroom 7). However, results seemed inconsistent. Even so, these early inconsistencies seem to have gone away with subsequent updates and bug fixes. And thankfully, Adobe will soon release another update to Lightroom that promises even better speed increases. We’ve been playing around with it for a few days to get a better idea of what to expect.

In a recent article, I shared a selection of easy-to-avoid photo editing mistakes. Today, it's time for five more. Some of them might sound obvious, while others are more subtle. What they all have in common: they can ruin an otherwise great edit.

What's the best way to optimize photos so that I can deliver quality to my clients while reducing the file size for faster uploads into the cloud? This has been a question I’ve been thinking about for sometime. I have tinkered with settings in Lightroom to try and find the right export recipe but it wasn’t till another photographer told me about JpegMini that I finally felt I had the solution. Using image optimization technology they developed, JpegMini was able to deliver maximum quality at minimum file size. I ran it through some tests and here are my results.

Presets are a contentious topic in the world of photography, especially when it seems that every photographer on YouTube has a pack of film emulations to flog. That said, they do have their place, and the people at Mango Street run you through what to consider when buying and how to put them to good use.

Editing your images can be a love/hate relationship depending on how you feel about post production. Getting tied down in your workflow can be a result of not having the right displays and shortcuts for better visualization of the final result. A few key tricks will lay out your most used tools and displays to get you in and out of Photoshop.

Recently I put my eyes under a lot of pressure. There are habits that anybody should abide by, but sometimes it's not always easy to stick with them. What's the worst that can happen?

If you're often frustrated by how little detail can be seen in your Instagram posts, this technique and free Photoshop template are for you.

Image sharpness is, for the most part, a false economy. It is mistakenly believed to be synonymous with image quality; that isn't the case. One major difference is that image quality has a ceiling and once reached (if that's even possible), the image cannot be any better in terms of quality. However, with the sharpness of an image, you can far exceed the perfect amount (again, if there is such a thing), and it begins to cost your image dearly.

Patrick and I decided to create a video series where we compete to see who can come up with the best image based on a set of randomly chosen rules. This week, one of us got to use an iPhone and the other had the entire studio at their disposal.

Photoshop for the iPad was touted as Adobe’s most important mobile application, with iPad owners very keen to use the image editing software. However, the app is lacking some key features, seems to have a horrific lag when using certain tools, and is now attracting shockingly bad reviews on the App Store. What happened?

It's hard to believe but the Nik Collection is 25 years old, going back to a commercial product that was very popular long ago. It was snagged by Google, then, as often happens, Google sold it to DXO, who has made a great many enhancements with each release.

For many of us, photography is a form of art, or at least there is an artistic process behind it. More than that, each of us strive to have a "style" that is an artistic consistency to our work. Photography, however, is quite different from your traditional art-making process. There is as much technical knowledge required as artistic or creative inspiration and thinking. This separates the process into two distinct parts: the shoot and the edit. These two parts are equally important to your identity as a photographer.

First-person cameras, such as the ubiquitous GoPro, have been filming hours of footage from their owner’s journeys for years now. These lengthy uncut videos don’t hold much interest to most people, but a team of Microsoft Researchers are aiming to change that by using some remarkable technology they hope to release as part of an upcoming app.

Shooting and editing photo sessions can be time consuming and altogether frustrating if you don't have a streamlined system. Here, a seasoned pro gives away some great tips for shaving time and frustration from your workflow.

I am always on the search for how to make my editing more productive, because honestly, it isn't my favorite part of being a photographer. We have posted in the past about culling your images using a game-pad. However by adding VSCO Keys to your workflow you can map almost any Lightroom slider on your remote. I have included program links and configuration files for an easy setup with an Xbox Remote.

If you are like me, you probably get numerous emails and Facebook messages from people in India wanting you to use their services for your image editing. While these individuals may give outsourcing to India a bad reputation, I’m here to show you what it’s really like at the reputable post-production service provider that is located in Mumbai, India: Pro Image Editors.

Post-production on images is a deep and varied process with no one way to do any task. So what are the most important tools and in which order should you use them?

It's already been a couple weeks since Serif announced the release of the Affinity Photo beta. I, along with literally thousands of others, have downloaded the program and started putting it through its paces, trying to fit it into my own personal workflow. In this little first impressions review I'll focus on Affinity Photo as a raw converter, a basic retouching platform, and put it up against the big dogs: Affinity versus Lightroom, and Affinity versus Photoshop.

Lightroom has a lot of features. Every now and then, you come across a feature that you either have never used or haven't used recently.

Have you ever edited and sharpened a photograph you wanted to print or post online only to have halos around the edges? Have you ever wanted to know how not to make that happen? If you answered yes, then this helpful video is for you.

If you are a user of one of the popular Nik Collection photo editing plugins, you have probably experienced errors in using the software recently. After Photoshop’s latest update, several users have reported that using the plugins will now force Photoshop to close when the plugin attempts to save its changes. This not only limits your use of Nik’s software, but it also will also cause you to lose all unsaved changes to your image prior to using the plugin. Luckily, there is a very simple workaround.

When looking at retouchers’ portfolios, you can separate the great ones from the rest by looking at their color correction. For example, when skin tones are not uniform, it makes the makeup artist look terrible just as much as the retoucher. There are multiple ways to correct color issues, but let’s see one that’s incredibly fast and easy to use for small localized issues, no matter what your photographic genre of choice is.